Stop Cash Shrink

Since the day in 2014 when I sniffed a $20 bill on camera at the request of a Fox News reporter, it has been clear that on the issue of banking marijuana “we don’t know what we don’t know.”

FYI, the reporter was asking if you really could smell marijuana on money that marijuana businesses were attempting to sneak into banks. (The answer is yes and that took us through the phases of would-be, but unwanted, depositors trying to disguise the smell with Febreze and later attempting to remove the smell by laundering the currency — literally — in a washing machine.)

We’re beyond those 2014 developments and dozens of other iterations, but it is clear: There is no clear, firm or reliable regulatory guidance to minimize bank liability, whether a bank chooses to try to block marijuana deposits as most banks do — or chooses to work with the cannabis industry, as a few have. And yet this guidance is growing increasingly necessary.